Building firms that placed more than 90 West Midlands workers on a secret blacklist should be banned from receiving government contracts, MPs have insisted.

The politicians have demanded that businesses involved in the scandal be excluded from winning contracts for school building programmes, the planned high speed rail line and other lucrative schemes.

It follows the revelation that construction firms ran a secret blacklist naming specific workers as troublemakers who should not be employed.

The scheme only came to light in 2009 when officials from the Information Commissioner’s Office, an official watchdog, raided an office in Worcestershire which had been used to store the list. But it is believed to have been going on for 20 years.

Around 40 construction firms paid £3,000 a year for the right to access the list, which contained the names of 3,213 workers.

A report published by the Scottish Home Affairs Committee in April this year named Amey, Balfour Beatty, John Laing, Morrison Construction, Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd, Tarmac, Taylor Woodrow, Trafalgar House and Willmott Dixon as among firms involved.

The list included details of their supposed shortcomings of employees.

For example, one construction worker was described as showing “signs of militancy over safety”, while another was named “as a shop steward and member of the Transport and General Workers Union” and a possible Communist.

It was administered by a business called The Consulting Association, based in Droitwich.

The firm’s Chief Executive, Ian Kerr, was fined £5,000 following the raid in 2009.

MPs have launched a consultation into whether the victims of the blacklist should be entitled to compensation and are also investigating whether blacklisting is still taking place.

Although the list, which operated for 16 years, was not illegal when it was first created, it was always “morally indefensible”, according to the Scottish Affairs Committee.

West Midland MP Ian Austin has laid down a series of written Parliamentary questions urging Cabinet Ministers to ensure infrastructure projects “are not delivered by firms involved in the blacklisting of construction workers”.

He told the Sunday Mercury: “People have lost their jobs. Some people found it impossible to work again.

“The companies responsible should admit what they have done and be held to account for it.”

Responding in the Commons, Business Minister Jo Swinson said: “Blacklisting is an appalling practice and that is why we brought in the Blacklists Regulations in 2010 to make certain that it is illegal.

“Any business, whether it works on public contracts or not, should comply with the law of the land.”

However, she warned that the restrictions would not be retrospective – which means only firms currently found to be breaking the law would face the threat of missing out on Government contracts.

MPs have published figures showing the number of people blacklisted by local authority.

They include 33 people in Birmingham, six in Dudley, seven in Walsall, two in Solihull, 11 in Wolverhampton, two in Sandwell, three in Coventry and one in Warwickshire. Across the West Midlands, 91 people were blacklisted.